"...true computer literacy means that we start to own this technology as individuals and as a gender when we see it as an empowering device..." - Brenda Laurel, From Barbie to Mortal Combat, 1999

Henny Admoni

Women@SCS conducted an interview with Henny Admoni, Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute.

Women@SCS
So could you tell us a little bit about your background and your
journey before you came to Carnegie Mellon?

Professor Admoni

Sure. My background really starts where I grew up, which was on Long
Island (in New York). I went to a really wonderful public high
school that had a research science program, and I got to do science
research as a high school student one class a day. That took me to
college. I went to college at Wesleyan University, which is a small
liberal arts college in Connecticut. And there I got to really kind
of broaden out and explore my interests. I started college thinking
I was going to be a journalist.

In my freshman year, I quickly realized that computer science was
pretty cool. I took an intro programming class and that led to an
intro CS class - and that led to CS2. And that kind of brought me
into computer science. So I came to computer science quite late
(relatively to a lot of people). In college I made up my own major
because I was unsatisfied with the majors that were offered to me.
Not that they weren’t great but I wanted something that was kind of
new at the time, which was bringing together computer science and
psychology, or computer science and cognitive science. So I designed
the major. I had support from the administration and from the
faculty to do that which was really wonderful.

And when it came time to choose where to go, I went to grad school
because I thought I really liked research and I could keep
investigating the cutting edge of this field (which was part AI and
part intelligent agents; part computer science, part cognitive
science). I picked a robotics lab for my PhD. And that was somewhat
of a naïve choice at the time because I thought, hey, robots are
just like intelligent agents in the real world. How hard can it be?
Turns out it’s hard but totally worth it.

I did my PhD at Yale in the social robotics lab, where I did a lot
of research on how robots can help people through social
interaction. Then I came to CMU for a postdoc and worked with people
here for about a year and a half on manipulation and how human
in-the-loop manipulation or how human robot interaction around
manipulation could work. And now I’m brand new faculty here. That’s
my very long journey.

Women@SCS
Yeah. That’s awesome. So I guess my next question was going to be:
were you always interested in robotics? And you kind of touched upon
that.

Professor Admoni
Yeah.

Women@SCS
So what attracted you to robotics? You said it was because they were
social agents in the real world.

Professor Admoni
Yeah. I didn’t know very much about robotics even in college. My
computer science program did not have a robotics class. So it wasn’t
really until grad school when robotics became an area that I was
interested in. I came to robotics from the AI perspective. I was
interested in AI because I cared about people, and I thought computer
science was a really lovely mathematical way of describing the world.
And maybe AI could be a mathematical way of describing intelligence,
what made people unique.

Turns out that’s still an open question. It’s really hard. But along
the way I discovered that AI and robotics can be a way to also help
people, not just learn about them. And so that’s kind of what drove me
to robotics - this idea that we could use it with the tools, the
mathematical tools that we have like computer science to understand
human beings and then also to make their lives better.

Women@SCS
That’s awesome. Yeah. So it seems like you’ve always had an
interdisciplinary approach to computer science or robotics. So can you
tell us about the current research projects that you’re working on?

Professor Admoni
Yeah. Absolutely. And interdisciplinary is exactly right. I work under
the broad umbrella of human-robot interaction. The current research
projects I have are all focused around assistive robots, robots that
help people. And they can help you in usually two broad categories.
One is socially assistive robots that help people through social
interactions like conversation. These are your robot tutors, your
robot coaches, robot therapy assistants that motivate people to engage
in dialogue, get people to stick to an exercise schedule, that kind of
thing.

And then the other half of the projects I worked on are physically
assistive robots. These are robots that manipulate the world, that
help people maybe with motor impairments to pick up objects in the
environment like a glass or water to take a drink. And these kind of
robots have to deal with the physical environment, computer vision,
grasping, locomotion, navigation, motion planning. Even though these
are two very different areas--the social side is much more about
dialogue and engagement and the physical side is much more about
manipulation--what underlies both of those is the need to understand
the people that are involved in the interaction and intent
recognition, reading human cues and using those to improve the robot’s
policy of the robot’s actions. And so, what really ties all of my
research together is this idea that we can read human behavior to
understand what kind of help people need and when they need help. And
by doing that, we can actually make assistive robots more effective
than just having them blindly help people without closing that loop.

Women@SCS
Yeah. That’s very interesting. So why did you choose to go into
academia? You said that you were interested in research.

Professor Admoni
Yeah. I was – I had been interested in research for a long time, since
high school basically. But even at the end of college I wasn’t totally
sure that I wanted to go into academia. I graduated from college and I
sat down my senior year with my college advisor and basically outlined
five different things I could do after college. One was go get a PhD.
One was stay at Wesleyan for another year and do a master’s degree and
then figure – and then you’ll get a PhD. One was go to industry, get a
computer science job somewhere. One was join the Peace Corps. And the
last one was do nothing for a while and try to figure it all out. And
doing nothing is an option. It was not the option I chose.

The option I chose was staying at Wesleyan for a master’s, a
fifth-year master’s degree before going to get a PhD. And the reason
that I eventually made that choice is I looked at my skill set and my
training and decided that the way that I could make an impact in the
world most effectively, most uniquely to me is by taking the research
abilities that I had and the training that I had and using it to
develop systems that helped people. So for me research is a way of
asking interesting questions, of giving back to humanity, of expanding
the breadth of our human knowledge while doing something that I feel
like is going to make the world a better place in the future.

Women@SCS
That’s awesome.

Professor Admoni
Yeah. You should totally – yeah, it takes a long time to find a
purpose like that.

Women@SCS
Right. Yeah. Definitely.

Professor Admoni
But that was what spoke to me the most strongly. And that’s what makes
day to day rigors of research worth it, that I have that vision in
mind.

Women@SCS
Wow. Yeah. It’s like a very bold vision.

Professor Admoni
Yeah.

Women@SCS
Yeah. So you say you’re pretty new to CMU faculty, right? I guess
that’s sort of what’s keeping you here?

Professor Admoni
Yeah. I’m delighted to be at CMU. I love CMU.

Women@SCS
[Laughing] That’s the right answer.

Professor Admoni
[Laughing] No. I did my post doc here. I’ve been at Carnegie Mellon
since December of 2015. But I’ve only been a faculty member since July
of 2017. So there was a year and a half where I was a post doc. And I
was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life afterward,
applying to all of these faculty jobs. And in the end, I decided to
stay at CMU because it just – the culture and the people here really
resonated well with me. The people here are of course brilliant and
doing really, really wonderful things. And that includes the faculty
but also the students.

But also, the culture of Carnegie Mellon, the idea that it’s not
necessarily just a technology school, that you can be good at
technology and drama and art and history. That the school encourages
kind of interdisciplinary and seemed to really also encourage the kind
of big picture vision of making the world better. Those were the
things that convinced me that I wanted to stay. I think the most
motivating thing was seeing the support from the administration for
projects that had a bold vision of improving the world, that it wasn’t
just kind of a slogan that was pasted on a lab somewhere. But it was
actually where they spent their time, where they spent their money,
where they spent their efforts in publicizing events and stuff like
that.

Women@SCS
Cool. I can definitely see all of that too. That may cover this next
question, which is “what’s your favorite and also least favorite part
of your job?”

Professor Admoni
Of my job.

Women@SCS
Yeah.

Professor Admoni
My least favorite part has to be scheduling. I schedule so many people
– and I’m sure that as I become more senior and more important this
will only get worse. But I feel like I schedule meetings constantly
and then I reschedule meetings constantly. And not the meetings
themselves but just the process of figuring out times that work for
people. This is probably the least favorite part of my job.

My favorite part is mentoring students. I think that beyond anything
else I do, the idea that I get to work closely with a new researcher
who is kind of building their research identity and figuring out what
they want to do. That kind of one-on-one relationship is the thing
that I think keeps me in academia, and would keep me in academia long
after research and teaching which I also love. But the one-on-one
mentorship, to me, is probably the most exciting part of this new job
that I get to do.

Women@SCS
Yeah. That’s awesome. Because I’m sure you can kind of see like your
own trajectory within those students.

Professor Admoni
Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And I had fantastic mentors. I really benefited
from some really solid mentorship and guidance kind of along the way.
So it’s nice to be able to give that back.

Women@SCS
Yeah. Ok. So switching gears a little bit, what advice would you have
for women in such a male dominated field, obviously.

Professor Admoni
Yeah.

Women@SCS
Like computer science.

Professor Admoni
I have two pieces of advice that are sort of related. One that I gave
at lunch is don’t ever say no to yourself. Make other people say no to
you. We know from research that women will apply to fewer jobs that
they feel unqualified for. That they will be more hesitant to reach
out for opportunities that they don’t think they fit perfectly. And I
say there’s no point in you deciding that you don’t fit an
opportunity. The best thing to do is to apply anyway, to email the
professor, to submit the application, to do the interview, whatever,
and let them tell you that you don’t fit. Because sometimes you’re
surprised by the idea that you do.

So that’s one thing: never say no to yourself. Make other people say
no to you. The other is take advantage of all of the “women in CS”
opportunities. I think there’s an upswell recently, but over even the
last ten years, of this idea of awareness about the need for diversity
in computer science.

Women@SCS
Right

Professor Admoni
And women have benefited from that a lot. And we’re seeing huge
changes because of that. CMU’s incoming undergrad class is 50 percent
women in computer science. Like that’s fabulous. We have work to do in
other underrepresented minorities. But that’s ok. We’re getting there.
My advice is to take advantage of every opportunity that you can get.
Every mentorship opportunity, every lunch, every conference, whatever
opportunity there is for women in CS.

Grab them because those opportunities are making up for 100 of the
missed opportunities that were invisible to a woman in the past and
that you might not necessarily even be aware of in the present. So
don’t be shy. Don’t feel like you don’t deserve it. Take the chances.
Take the opportunities that you are given and use them well and do
good stuff with them.

Women@SCS
Definitely. Should we move on to the last one?

Professor Admoni
Sure.

Women@SCS
So I think you briefly touched upon this during the lunch too. Like
how at Yale, for example, there were tons of clubs and other
extracurricular opportunities. So how did you historically manage your
time and organize your schedule for everything you did.

Professor Admoni
That’s a good question. And I said this at the lunch. It’s super
important to maintain balance in your life. And that balance doesn’t
have to be over the course of a day. There will be days that are more
work heavy and days that are less work heavy. But when you look at
your life over weeks and months, you have to be happy with the balance
that you’re striking. For me, it helps to have a goal.

For example, exercise for me is really important, so I usually pick
some sort of exercise goal. Like two years ago, I ran the Pittsburgh
marathon. And that took a lot of time to train. I ran it very slowly,
but I finished it. It took a lot of time to train but it was a goal
that I could work toward. I made commitments to myself, and I put
workouts on my calendar the same way I put meetings on my calendar and
block that time off. And those became part of my job. Part of my job
was to run this marathon just as part of my job was to get a faculty
job. So the way that I usually end up finding time for myself is by
committing to a particular goal and then treating it like any other
meeting or commitment that I’ve made.

It’s also important to find things that are fun for you. So
extracurriculars or whatever shouldn’t be boring. I really enjoy
swimming. I swam in high school. So a few years ago, I picked up
triathlon because that was another – like it was a way for me to
interact with people to go on group bike rides, to keep swimming, to
do running which was really good for me. It crossed off a lot of
things on my list as once.

Women@SCS
Nice! I guess this is a more specific question. How was your undergrad
experience? What other kind of extracurricular activities besides
exercise did you do besides research?

Professor Admoni
Good question.I played the cello. I played the cello all throughout
high school and even college in orchestras. And that was something
that was really important to me to grow up with this connection to
music. I love board games, too, so for me a great night is having a
bunch of friends over and playing whatever the most recent board game
is.

Women@SCS
That's awesome.

Professor Admoni
College was a little more organized, so my extracurriculars were kind
of like related to clubs. Gosh. It was so long ago. What clubs did I
do? I honestly can’t even remember. I’m sure there were lots of them.
But these days honestly my extracurriculars are things like going
hiking. I joined Venture Outdoors which is a Pittsburgh based
nonprofit that takes people outside and they run multiple events a
week of hikes or kayaking or outdoor adventures. And so, I’ve gone on
a bunch of activities with them too. I like being outside. I love
eating. I love exploring Pittsburgh through the food which is very
really fun to do. This is a good city for it. Yeah. And I love kind of
curling up with a good book sometimes too. I still read for fun a lot.

Women@SCS
Yeah. And I guess for each of those activities do you do the same
thing where you like block out a time?

Professor Admoni
Some I do. Things like Venture Outdoors are nice because they have
specific events that happen at specific times. So you can go to that
event and you kind of commit to it. Others I kind of do to fill in my
time. But I definitely block off time on the weekend that I commit to
not working. Like on the weekend I say I’m going to work this many
hours and then I’m going to spend the rest of my time guilt free
reading this novel. And I allow myself to do that because I recognize
that that recovery time – like in exercise recovery time is just as
important as training time.